CES 2015 Medical Highlights: Gimmicky or Genius?

The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas never fails to impress. CES is a place innovators and engineers can come to debut and show off what they hope will be a groundbreaking technology. Sometimes they succeed; sometimes they don’t. However, the fascinating ideas are never in short supply, which was evident in some of the health-related technologies showed off at CES 2015.

Many of us know sitting for extended periods of time is (probably) incredibly bad for our health – yet we continue to do it. Humanscale hopes to change the way we sit and work with OfficeIQ. Using bluetooth and sensors in both the chair and desk, OfficeIQ will interact with an app to provide prompts to let workers know when they should get up or sit back down to a workstation that will adapt its height. Before you start naysaying, it’s important to know that OfficeIQ has been designed to not send the prompts when someone is typing or during a phone call.

Imagine being able to scan an item or the environment around you to determine the chemical and molecular makeup. That’s precisely what SCiO’s creators hope their new handheld device can help people do. According to them, SCiO will be able to scan medicine, food and plants to provide a wide array of information on the makeup of materials in our everyday lives.

A smart bandage on display at CES 2015, called TempTraq, may change the way doctors monitor our health. The patch uses bluetooth technology to monitor a person’s temperature every two minutes and send updates to a smartphone app. The disposable patch is being promoted as a helpful alternative to look after and care for young children who may be sick without the need to constantly check their temperature.

Another wearable creating buzz at CES was Quell: a device that can be strapped to parts of the body experiencing pain and alleviate that pain. By using with sensors targeting the nerves, Quell works to trick the brain into releasing opiates and ease pain. Quell promises up to 40 hours of pain relief on a single charge and is already FDA approved in the U.S.

CES 2015 wasn’t completely about the gadgets, though. a fascinating panel discussion on the future of the healthcare industry and the groundbreaking technologies that could be on the horizon. Among those discussed: artificial intelligence, genomics and robotics.